To help you migrate your Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS) application from ECS 3.0 to ECS 4.0, we have included a Migration Guide in the ECS 4.0 documentation. If you would like to see additional topics covered in the Migration Guide, please let us know!

We recently introduced some new HTML forms that you can use as alternatives to the ECS remote shopping cart. You can read about these new forms in the ECS 4.0 documentation (see ECS Cart Alternatives). If you have questions about how to use these forms, we encourage you to post your questions on the AWS Discussion Board.

Courtesy of SitePoint, a two page tutorial -- Use Amazon Web Services in ASP.NET . This article introduces the user to the general concept of a web service, covers the AWS license, caching rules, loading the WSDL into Visual Studio (the article uses the 2005 "Express" version, but the code will also work just fine in VS.Net 2003), creating a UI, dealing with response groups, use of the .Net cache and DataSet objects.

The comments added to the article include some additional information on WSDL compatibility issues. We are working with Microsoft to simplify the process of using ECS 4 with the "Express" product line.

We are introducing a new BrowseNodeLookup operation that provides information pertaining to a Browse Node. Browse Nodes are product categories that Amazon creates to segment products based on pre-defined and/or dynamic criteria. BrowseNodeLookup has been one of the most frequently requested features by ECS users and we're thrilled to announce the availability of this feature. ECS users can use this operation to benefit from Amazon's merchandising structure in categorizing products on their Web site and to get the information needed to make Browse Node-specific search queries.

It is worth noting that many developers asked for this feature during the beta test of ECS 4.0, and that we did everything within our power to get this feature up and running in a very short amount of time.

The Amazon Simple Queue Service is now available for beta testing. The Simple Queue Service offers a reliable, highly scalable hosted queue for buffering messages between distributed application components.

You can use the Amazon Simple Queue Service to better manage messages between components of your distributed applications. SQS allows you to decouple components and make them run independently. Any component of a distributed application can store any type of data in a reliable queue at Amazon.com. Any other component or application can then later retrieve the data using queue semantics. The queue acts as a buffer between the work-producer that is saving the data, and the work-consumer that is retrieving the data for processing.

Registered developers can create any number of queues. Each queue can hold up to 4,000 items and each item can be up to 4,096 bytes in length.

The Amazon Simple Queue Service is free at this time. We anticipate charging for this service once it is officially released. We haven't finalized pricing yet, but we expect to make this service available to you at a very reasonable price.

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